SLOVENIAN ROOTS QUEST

Žganci: Mysteries of Buckwheat

2012-02-05T21:31:00.000-08:00

Ajdovi Žganci with Cracklings (from Wikipedia)

Žganci is one of a handful of quintessentially Slovenian dishes. There is an entire page devoted to it on a government website: Žganci, Always and Forever.

But it's hard to classify.

The Progessive Slovene Women of America call it buckwheat mush (ajdovi žganci) and include it in the "Bread-Biscuits-Mush" section of Treasured Slovenian and International Recipes. The American Slovene Club, in Our Favorite Recipes, classifies it as a potato substitute, and refer to it as buckwheat crumbles. Woman's Glory puts it in the catch-all "Varieties" category.

The recipes left me feeling even more confused. The ingredients were simple, just buckwheat flour and salt water, in a 1:2 ratio. My three vintage cookbooks, as well as the many recipes on the web, all offered virtually identical (and peculiar) instructions.

To make žganci, you boil the salted water and then add the buckwheat flour. Some say you add it gradually, while you slowly stir. Others suggest you just dump it in all it once. But they all agree on one key point: Once the flour is added, you stop stirring. The Progressive Slovene women shout it out: DO NOT MIX.

You let the mix boil while the flour magically turns into a giant lump. Then you make a hole in the center of the cake of flour with the handle of a wooden spoon so the water can cook it from the inside. The water should bubble up over the lump. Then you cover the pan and let it cook for 15 minutes (or maybe 45?) Finally, you pour off half the water and stir in the rest. Pour melted butter on top. Cover and let sit.

Most sources suggest that you pick up spoonfuls of the big buckwheat cake and use a fork to flake off crumbles, which should be "piled fluffily" into a bowl.

I made a small recipe:

2 c. water
pinch of salt
1 c. buckwheat flour

I brought the salted water to a brisk boil and slowly poured in the flour. Then I watched and waited. To my great surprise, the flour did start to cohere into a large brown lump:

Boiling Buckwheat Flour

After about 5 minutes, I nudged the lump with a spoon. It seemed fairly solid. So I poked a hole in the center of the mass with the handle of a wooden spoon. Now it looked like this:

Buckwheat Volcano

As I continued to watch, I began to worry. There wasn't enough water to cover the top of the lump. So I added more water. Oh-oh. Now it stopped boiling. I started to worry that the lump was beginning to dissolve. What if I was left with a pot of boiling mush?

The lump still felt firm. I gently stuck in a knife, to see if the inside was cooked. To my horror, I discovered that the firm exterior encased a ball of raw, uncooked flour!

At that point, I panicked. Something had gone terribly wrong. I figured the only way to salvage this mess was to turn it into a polenta. I took a fork and beat it into submission.

To my amazement, the brown soup and the raw flour mass was easily transformed into a nice, smooth polenta!

I poured it into a dish, which my husband had greased with olive oil. I stuck it into the oven to firm up.

I topped it off with two nice thick slices of bacon, cooked to a crisp in the microwave. It looked like this:

The Final Version: Žganci with Bacon

The verdict: Delicious! A dark, tangy polenta that provided a fine accompaniment to the chicken ajmoht in my third week dinner.

And when I checked back, I discovered that I had done exactly what the Progressive Slovene Women had intended. None of those little crumbles for them. The goal was just a nice smooth mush.

Evidently, I had simply made a regional variation, in what's called the softer Styrian style.

As they say on that government website: "Any day is right for žganci! You know, to keep you strong."

Chicken Ajmoht (chicken ragout, kurji ajmoht, obara)

2012-02-01T23:09:00.000-08:00

This recipe is based on what the Progressive Slovene Women of America call chicken ragout. Like true scholars, they carefully list those alternative names you see below. My changes were minimal. I used chicken breasts instead of a whole cut-up chicken. I increased the vegetables and the seasonings.

We found this to be a very tasty dish, with a subtle kind of tang. Much more to it than I expected from the simple recipe. Next time, I might increase the seasonings and the vegetables even more.

There was one dissenting voice. My mother. I froze a single serving and delivered it to her the next week. She never mentioned it, so I finally asked.

She didn't mince words. "Not good."

Why not?

"It wasn't like a soup."

I explained that it wasn't supposed to be a soup. More like a ragout. But she recalled that veal soup of her childhood. And she didn't like the little chicken bones she discovered.

(I'm still waiting for her verdict on the žganci!)

Chicken Ajmoht (chicken ragout, kurji ajmoht, obara)

2+ lbs. chicken breasts, with bone and skin, cut up
2 T. olive oil
2 quarts water (about)
2 ribs celery, chopped
½ onion, chopped
4 T. fresh parsley, minced
1 T. fresh marjoram, minced
roux: 2 ½ T. flour, 2 ½ T olive oil and butter mixed
salt and pepper to taste
white wine vinegar to taste

Heat oil in a dutch oven and add onion and celery. Brown vegetables. Add chicken and seasonings and continue to brown Add water to cover and simmer, covered, for 45 minutes or until tender. In a separate pan, make a roux, cooked to medium brown. Add to the pot and stir well. Add remaining water, white wine vinegar, and adjust seasonings. Simmer about 15 minutes more. Sprinkle with additional parsley. Serve with dumplings, noodles, or (if you dare!) žganci.

A word about roux: None of my vintage cookbooks belabor the process, because it is so fundamental. You heat shortening of your choice ("oleo or fat" was the original in this recipe.) Then you stir in flour and keep stirring as it browns. We figured that the final color should be browner than a pale American cream sauce, but not quite the deep brown of a Louisiana roux.

Full disclosure: I put my husband in charge of making the roux. He is locally famous for his Louisiana gumbo, so I knew he would do it right.

Besides, at that point in the proceedings, I needed all the help I could get. I was elbow deep in the žganci.

Slovenian Dinner Week 3: A Tasty Roux and a Buckwheat Volcano

2012-02-01T22:44:00.000-08:00

*Chicken Ajmoht (Obara)

*Buckwheat Žganci with Bacon

Green Salad

After a couple of successful Slovenian meals, I had begun to feel confident. True, I had started out with the familiar. Stuffed cabbage. Jelly rolls, otherwise known as palačinke. Then, that little side trip into šmoren. So far, so good.

It was time to branch out into less familiar territory.

Except it wasn't as unfamiliar as I thought, because it revolved around a core element in a cuisine I had come to know well. Roux. The foundation of Louisiana French cooking. I'd been immersed in that culture since I fell in love with the Cajun accordion, twenty years earlier.

Roux is simple enough: Flour browned in fat, used as a base for thickening sauce or gravy. But a Louisiana roux is something else. Cooked long and slow, with constant stirring, it can take an hour until it turns the requisite dark brown. Roux gives that special rich zest to Cajun and Creole favorites like gumbo, along with so many other dishes.

There is even a popular Cajun cookbook: Who's Your Mama, Are You Catholic and Can You Make a Roux?

But it wasn't just the Cajuns and Creoles of Louisiana who had figured out the magical powers of roux. My Slovenian forbears were also in on the secret. Who knew?

Well, my mother knew, as it turned out.

She had started to talk about a veal soup her mother used to make. "Aye-macht" is what she thought it was called. When I started to browse through my vintage cookbooks, I came across something called "ajmoht." It seemed to be a cross between a soup and a stew. The key element was something called ajprem, or roux. It turned up everywhere. Stews. Vegetable dishes. Cucumber gravy. There was even a soup that seemed to be nothing but water and roux.

So I found a dish that looked easy. A sort of chicken ragout made with roux. Maybe a very simple version of the Cajun chicken and sausage gumbo my husband had learned to make so well.

To accompany it, I decided to try something that was supposed to be a uniquely Slovenian dish. It was a sort of buckwheat dumpling. Or maybe it a kind of polenta. The preparation seemed a little. . . unusual. So was the name, at least if you don't speak Slovenian.

Žganci. Pronounced "zhe-gahn-see." At least I think so.

Buckwheat volcano would be more like it. That žganci would turn out to be my biggest challenge so far.

Slovenian Breakfast Week 2: Palačinke to Šmoren ("shmoren")

2012-01-26T06:09:00.000-08:00

*Palačinke and Šmoren
Šumska Jagoda (Serbian Strawberry Jam)
Blueberries

When you can't choose between two Slovenian breakfast treats, what do you do? I decided to try both, especially when some recipe browsing convinced me that the same egg-milk-flour batter could work for either one.

It's true that the šmoren recipes in my three vintage Slovenian American cookbooks all called for separating the egg whites and yolks, which is not the usual approach for making palačinke or crêpes. But an Internet search turned up a number of recipes where whole eggs were beaten together. So I decided to use the egg-rich šmoren version below. It turns out to be virtually identical to the crêpe suzette batter in that most iconic of American cookbooks, The Joy of Cooking.

2 eggs
2 T plus 2 t. milk
2 T plus 2 t. flour
1 T sugar
dash of salt

Beat all together.

For 1 petite crêpe: Melt butter in a 7 inch skillet and heat until a drop of water sizzles. Pour in enough batter to coat the bottom in a thin layer when you tilt the pan. When firm, flip over and cook till done. Fill as you wish and roll up. I used my traditional family favorite of butter and brown sugar, with a side of amazing Serbian strawberry jam that my journalist son brought home from the Balkans at Christmas.

For 1 small serving of šmoren: Now I was entering terra incognita. I melted butter in a 7 inch skillet as above and poured the rest of the batter in. I had read directions and looked at pictures. Some say you stir, some say you create little tunnels in the batter as it cooks, so it all gets done. Some suggest you make a sort of omelet, then chop it into bits. The idea is to have little eggy crumbles. Or is it cubes? The eggs were cooking so I didn't have much time to decide. I stirred and scraped and flipped and chopped. I ended up with the eggy crumbles you can see in the photo. I sprinkled them with brown sugar. Good, if slightly dense.

My conclusion: For a party of one, I would be inclined to go with the tried and true palačinke. That is the sentimental favorite, of course. The jelly rolls of my childhood. But for a crowd, I can see the advantage of šmoren. Quick, easy, and tasty. . . and the cook gets to join the family for breakfast.

Of course, it was possible that I hadn't given the šmoren a fair shot, since I hadn't tried the more typical version, with the beaten egg whites folded in.

But that would be for another day, I figured.

Except that day came sooner than I expected. It turns out that my husband, far from being relieved, was disappointed that there was no Slovenian dinner that night! I tried to keep it in the proper spirit, at least: I made cornmeal polenta to go along with a leftover sausage dish.

So, a few days later, I made another batch of šmoren, for our weekend breakfast. This time, I followed the less eggy and more labor intensive recipe for Pancake Crumbles (Šmoren) in Treasured Slovenian & International Recipes, published by the Progressive Slovene Woman of America.

This one appears to be the standard recipe for šmoren, since it shows up in many places.

1 C. flour
1/2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. salt
2 egg yolks, beaten
1 C. milk
2 egg whites, stiffly beaten
butter for the pan

Mix the dry ingredients. Add the egg yolks and milk and mix. Fold in egg whites. Melt butter to coat frying pan. They suggest a heavy skillet (a good idea) and 1/4 C. of butter (not so good!) I managed with about a tablespoon of butter.

For the šmoren: Melt butter in a 10 inch skillet. Pour in the batter. The Progressive Slovene Women suggest waiting until the mixture thickens on the bottom before you turn it over. Then you "keep turning and chopping until lightly browned and little balls of crumbles are formed."

It worked for us. Once again, it was a tasty dish, enhanced with a topping of brown sugar or jam, along with some Greek yogurt. I found this version, with the greater proportion of flour to egg, vaguely reminiscent of Jewish matzo brie, one of our breakfast favorites. (My husband, who grew up with matzo brie, didn't quite see the connection, though.)

Which version of šmoren is better? I think I prefer the first one. This second one is higher carb and requires more effort. Even with all that leavening, it still comes out a pretty dense dish.

And besides, it doesn't allow for the jelly roll option!

"Easy-To-Prepare Breakfast for Teenage Girl"

2012-01-21T11:29:00.000-08:00

We had just finished the previous week's stuffed cabbage when Tuesday rolled around again. It was the day I'd designated for my weekly Slovenian cooking adventure. The one day I work from home and have the kitchen to myself.

Unfortunately, I had already started to feel overwhelmed at the thought of another meat-heavy meal. I figured my husband (the main cook in our family) might have passed his limit. Not a good sign, since this was just the second week in a year-long project.

So I decided to take a break. Instead of dinner, I would make a Slovenian-style breakfast for a party of one. I could get my ethnic meal out of the way early (and privately) and make us a normal dinner.

I consulted Women's Glory, my vintage guidebook to Slovenian American cooking. In the middle of the "candies" section, they had strategically placed a page called "Easy-To-Prepare Breakfast for Teenage Girl."

At the top of the page, a smiling pre-teen girl posed behind her healthy breakfast. I did a double-take. That 1950s shirtwaist dress could have come out of my own closet. She had her dark hair in a lopsided page boy 'do. Rounded cheeks, rounded arms, slightly thick waist. A pretty little girl, but already on her way to plumpness. It was like looking into a mirror and into the past. My past. . . and my future, as a perennial dieter.

Weight-conscious girls are prone to skipping breakfast, the authors warn. But three well-balanced meals, starting with a good breakfast, are an important protection against obesity. So here's what they suggest, for the Basic Breakfast: Orange juice (4 ounces). Cornflakes (1 ounce) with milk (4 ounces). Buttered toast (2 slices). Milk to drink (8 ounces.)

A teenage boy, of course, needs more: Twice those quantities of cereal and milk, with some sugar on top, Plus an egg, another piece of toast with jam, for a total of three slices. Finished off with a cup of cocoa. Evidently, the Slovenian American boy of that era didn't need to watch his weight.

Hmm. Corn flakes, white bread with butter, orange juice, whole milk. Not the kind of diet that has ever worked for me. But more wholesome than Pop Tarts. And better than nothing at all.

But if I was going to consider today's breakfast as part of an ethnic cooking project, I had to do something better than that.

I had one easy solution, and a fitting one: Jelly Rolls.

That's how we referred to the special treat my mother made for weekend breakfasts. Paper thin egg-rich pancakes, made one at a time in a frying pan, and then wrapped around assorted fillings. Jelly was traditional. My Scottish father, who liked savory foods, took his jelly rolls with butter only. But the favorite with us kids was butter and brown sugar. My mother would stand at the stove, frying them up, sometimes trying to store a supply in the oven, so she could sit and eat with us. But the four of us could eat those jelly rolls as fast as she could cook them.

Filled with cottage cheese, they became blintzes. My mother had learned about blintzes, she said, from our close family friends who were Jewish. A little later, we learned that jelly rolls were the same thing as French crêpes.

French crêpes. Jewish blintzes. American jelly rolls. But there is one name we never learned: palačinke. Palachinke. The Slovenian version of the same treat, and also a traditional food. But my mother never suggested that our beloved jelly rolls had any connection to her Slovenian roots.

Jelly rolls would be easy. But almost too familiar, since I already made them myself, though not as often as I did when my own children were small.

Meanwhile, I had come across another dish, with the same ingredients, but in an unfamiliar form. An odd but intriguing hybrid: A cross between an eggy pancake and an omelet, but chopped or torn into bits.

Each of my cookbooks had a version. Woman's Glory included a recipe for Kaiserschmarrn, or Emperor's Omelet, in the pastry section. The American Slovene Club's cookbook listed Crumble Pudding, or Shmarm, as a dessert as well as a potato substitute.

The Progessive Slovene Women of America seemed to have the most accurate take on the dish, right down to the proper spelling. Under Egg Dishes, they offered a recipe for Pancake Crumbles, or Šmoren.

Palačinke or šmoren? A beloved old favorite or an oddball dish that I couldn't quite envision?

I had the perfect solution: I would do both, with the same egg-milk-flour batter.

It would be an adventure.

Recipes follow.

Stuffed Cabbage, Slovenian-style: Bound for Glory

2012-01-15T18:52:00.000-08:00

This was not the first time I made stuffed cabbage. But it was my first attempt at doing it Slovenian-style, from a vintage ethnic cookbook called Woman's Glory: The Kitchen.

I came up with a combination of three recipes I found in that yellowing book: Sarma, Sarmi, Cabbage Bundles. Variations on a theme, but my own adaptation, for my first Slovenian Dinner in my back-to-my-roots cooking project.

My mother really liked it. Just like her mother's, she said. And it was amazing, the way my Berkeley kitchen was suddenly transformed into my grandma's. There it was: the smell of Cleveland's East Side in the 1950s. The scent of Central Europe. Such a mysterious alchemy, from a recipe that seemed so familiar, so unremarkable. Maybe it was the paprika.

I liked those cabbage rolls. So did my husband. (It's a good thing, since we were eating them for days!)

But the recipe is not quite there yet. It needs more onion. More seasonings. Next time, I may adopt the suggestion of one of those recipes, to cook the cabbage rolls on a bed of sauerkraut.

Yes, the recipe needs some tweaking. But it's on the way. Bound for Glory.

Stuffed Cabbage, Slovenian Style (Sarma)

1/2 red onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

2 T olive oil

3/4 cup rice, rinsed and drained

1 1/2 t. salt

1 t. pepper

1 t. paprika

1 t. fresh mint, chopped

1/2 cup fresh parsley, chopped

2 T. crushed tomatoes

1/2 lb. each of ground beef, pork and turkey (1 1/2 lb. total)

1 egg, beaten

1 large head green cabbage

Extra green and red cabbage leaves (next time: sauerkraut!)

Equal parts of beef broth and crushed tomatoes, mixed, to equal about 3 cups of liquid

Salt and pepper to taste

For filling: Brown onion and garlic in oil. Add rice and brown, then add seasonings, parsley, tomatoes, and mix. Let cool. Mix in meat and egg.

For cabbage: Cut out core of cabbage. Cover in hot water and boil for about 5 minutes. Drain and separate leaves.

To make the rolls: Cut out the tough rib of each cabbage leaf. Place a portion of meat on the leaf. Roll up securely, envelope style. Secure with toothpicks.

Put extra cabbage leaves in bottom of large greased frying pan or Dutch oven. Put cabbage rolls on top, packing tightly. Add liquid, almost to cover. Cover and simmer until done, about 1 hour.

Dober Tek!

Slovenian Dinner Week 1

2012-01-09T15:46:00.001-08:00

*Stuffed Cabbage (Sarma)

*Cucumber Salad

Serbian Corn Bread

Coleslaw

Christmas Potica (aka Slovenian Nut Roll)

Here it is! This was my inaugural menu for the Josephine and Jožefa project. The first week of January, I set out to begin my year of cooking ethnically. Or, to be more exact, Slovenian-ly.

What to say about this first menu? I decided to make a main dish and a side dish from Woman's Glory. Those are the starred dishes. For the stuffed cabbage, an old favorite, I tried to combine the best of the three or four versions offered. Naturally, I made a few changes. I couldn't bring myself to use 2/3 cup of fat to saute the onion! As for the filling . . . well, we are not big meat eaters, but I figured I could go along with the pork and beef. But we draw the line at veal in our house, so I substituted ground turkey for that part of the mix.

I figured I would "cheat" with dessert, since I still had leftover Christmas potica. The Serbian cornbread and coleslaw, also leftover, were extra. I figured they fit pretty well, ethnically speaking. Besides, the spirit of these vintage American ethnic cookbooks was practical and eclectic. You used what was at hand.

I will be posting the recipes soon. My Slovenian-style stuffed cabbage is still a work in progress. (This version came out tasty but under spiced.) The cucumber salad was quick and easy: sliced cucumbers, sour cream mixed with yogurt and garlic, along with a little paprika, probably the one Slovenian touch.

As for the potica? That's the one and only Slovenian food I grew up eating and preparing. You can find my potica recipe included in a long essay I wrote over on my more "literary" blog. It's called Potica, Bread of Memory.

This year's Christmas potica included one new touch: I added dried cranberries. This might not seem like much of a stretch, since many versions do include raisins. But my family doesn't do that. So it was a bold move on my part. Pretty well received, too.

Woman's Glory: The Kitchen (New Year's Resolution)

2012-01-08T11:10:00.001-08:00

I bought this classic mid-century Slovenian American cookbook last year, as a Christmas gift for myself. But I've just realized what a gem it is. In fact, it has given me a whole new direction in my Slovenian roots quest.

Woman's Glory was first published in the early 1950's in Chicago, by the Slovenian Women's Union of America. This well-used 1958 edition, which I discovered for sale online, was edited by Albina Novak. It's a charming mix of traditional Slovenian recipes and classic 50's American cuisine like jello molds and casseroles made with canned soup.

I have in mind a sort of ethnic version of "Julie and Julia." I doubt
that I'll cook every recipe in Woman's Glory. In fact, I won't even limit myself to this book, because I've just added two more vintage cookbooks to my collection.

Here's my resolution for the New Year: Once a week, I'll make an all-Slovenian dinner. I'll try to stick to recipes from my trio of Slovenian American cookbooks from the 1940's and 1950's. Maybe I'll call it "Josephine and Jožefa: My Year of Cooking Ethnically." That was the first name, in English and Slovenian, of my immigrant great-grandmother. In fact, I've already started. I made my very first dinner last week!

Potica, Bread of Memory | Blair Kilpatrick | Blog Post | Red Room

2011-12-14T08:28:00.000-08:00

Potica, Bread of Memory | Blair Kilpatrick | Blog Post | Red Room

I wrote this essay to answer a question posed on a writing community called Red Room: What is the secret ingredient in your holiday traditions?

Naturally, I wrote about potica, the rich yeast bread that is probably Slovenia's most well known dish. My family's version is more pastry than bread. It's like the love child of brioche and baklava.

The secret ingredients are:

love, memory, and family
ambivalence
a refrigerated yeast dough made with sour cream
a simple, uncooked nut filling
a heavy hand with the honey

To see the recipe, follow the link above.

A long overdue update

2011-11-29T07:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers,

I'm so glad that some of you continue to find my little orphan blog!
I am still here. And I am still living, reading, and writing my Slovenian roots journey. I just haven't been writing about it much on this blog.

I do blog regularly about a variety of topics, including this one, at my main author site, at www.blairkilpatrick.com.

In the last year, I have learned much more about my family history. Not all of it is pretty, but it remains endlessly fascinating.

I have also stepped into the intriguing world of genetic genealogy. Yes, DNA testing. First for myself, and then for my Slovenian American mother. So now I have long lists of distant DNA cousins to pursue, many of them with Slovenian roots. I've even connected with a 4th cousin, or so the DNA says, whose Slovenian immigrant ancestors started out in Ely, Minnesota, just like mine.

But here is the biggest change: Getting to know more real world Slovenians and Slovenian Americans. (Finally!) I have been spending more time at San Francisco's Slovenian Hall in the last year, where I've met so many sweet, lovely people. I've served up sauerkraut at festive dinners and learned to recognize the Slovenian national anthem. I can sing a one word song called "Zivio!" I did a book-and-music presentation there in the spring (see photo above!) and I'm proud to say that Accordion Dreams now has a place in their small library. So I guess that makes me an official Slovenian American author.

Oh yes. I am working on a new book. It's about my Slovenian roots journey.

And a final development: My family is going to be having a reunion. Hard to believe. I've connected with first cousins I haven't seen (or spoken to) in forty years. We're even exchanging potica recipes.

I love to hear from readers, so feel free to get in touch. I've decided to devote more time and attention to this blog. My new writing and cooking project will begin in January, so please check back.

Happy Holidays!

Blair

Immigration Dreams, Part II

2010-02-16T18:06:00.000-08:00

My grandmother Mary, the child of divorced Slovenian immigrants, left school after the fourth grade. She was working at a Slovenian boarding house when she met her husband-to-be. It wasn't exactly a romantic story. She later told my mother, by way of explanation, "What could I do? He forced himself on me."

My grandfather, Alois (Louis) Kozlevčar, had emigrated from a Slovenian village called Zatična (now Stična) in 1911. He'd lost his parents in the influenza epidemic and got passed around to a few relatives before he decided to leave for America. Family lore gives his age as twelve at the time of immigration, but his official birthdate makes him seventeen.

He'd been a farm laborer in Slovenia. He worked as a miner for a few years in Pennsylvania before he moved to Cleveland, where he became a factory worker.

My grandparents, Mary and Louis, were married by an Ohio justice of the peace in 1917. She was fifteen . . . although the marriage license claims eighteen. Their first child, my uncle, was born less than a year later.

They all led such hard lives. Not much freedom, as far as I can tell. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my grandfather all turned to alcohol. There is a kind of freedom, even if it's short-lived, in the bottle.

The only thing I know about their dreams is this:

When I was ten, I received a note from my grandma. I'd gone off to Girl Scout Camp for two weeks. My first time away from home. I was only a little bit homesick.

Grandma sent me a card with a dollar bill inside. Her short note ended like this: "Sometimes I wish I had a dog, then I would roam. Don't mind me, I am just being silly."

I remember feeling surprised and very sad, when I read that. At the time, I knew nothing about the harsh circumstances of her life. So why did my grandma, a sweet and loving woman, a baker of homemade bread and strudel and potica, sound so unhappy?

Since then, the truth about my family has come out slowly. Some of it my mother has revealed, in bits and pieces. Much of it I have had to search for. I may not know the whole picture. But I know enough. So now I feel an even deeper sense of melancholy, when I think of my grandmother. When I think about all of them.

But I am also grateful. Because life did get better, eventually . . . but not until the next generation. My mother's generation. My tough Slovenian ancestors pursued a promise of freedom, or at least a hope for something better in America. But the payoff was deferred for years.

Immigration Dreams, Part I

2010-02-16T17:09:00.000-08:00

I've been living in the past lately. My family's immigrant past. Passenger manifests. Naturalization cards. Census records. Marriage licenses. Following their paper trail. You can learn almost everything. Except for this one thing: What hopes carried them along? Were they pursuing some lofty ideal of freedom?

I wish I knew.

My Scottish father died eighteen years ago, so I can't ask him. Besides, he was just a little boy when his family settled in the United States in the 1920s, so he might not have known. The Kilpatricks were, as far as I can tell, a respectable working class family in Glasgow. Not oppressed, but looking for something better.

For my mother's Slovenian family, I have to go back farther. The facts seem starker. Especially for the women.

My great-grandfather, Alois Adamič, a 30-year old farmer, left Ponikve, a village in Slovenia, in 1898. He passed through Ellis Island and ended up working as a miner in Ely, a small but booming town in Minnesota's Iron Range, where he had a sister.

In 1899, a 19-year-old Slovenian girl named Jožefa Strukelj, a maid, left a little village called Maćki. According to the Ellis Island ship manifest, her destination was also Ely, Minnesota, where she had a brother.

Six weeks after Jožefa arrived in Ely, she was married to my great-grandfather. A local Catholic priest performed the ceremony, two days after they got the license.

"It must have been an arranged marriage." That's what my mother said, when I presented her with this surprising fact about her grandparents.

In 1902 Alois and Jožefa (now Louis and Josephine) had their first child: Mary, my grandmother, who was baptised Maria. She was the first of my family--on either side-- to be born in the United States.

Mary and her parents soon left Ely for another mining town, in eastern Pennsylvania, where her brother Joseph was born. Eventually, they settled for good in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the largest Slovenian community outside of Slovenia itself.

Louis and Josephine got divorced when their children were young. After that, my grandmother and her brother were "treated like bastards" in their community. At least that's what my mother was told.

Found the stresica!

2010-01-24T09:42:00.000-08:00

Finally! I figured out that pesky little diacritical mark! That little inverted "v" that sits on top of certain letters in Slovene.

I need it in order to write some of my family names properly: Adamič and Kozlevčar. Or, for that matter, to properly title my welcome to this blog. It should have been like this: dobrodošli.

It's called a "stresica" in Slovene, which means "little roof." It creates those three additional letters in the Slovene language: š, č, and ž. Pronounced "sh" and "ch" and "zh."

I must have spent half a day figuring out how to do this on my nice new Christmas MacBook. No, it's not rocket science. And it's certainly not the biggest hurdle in the Slovene language, which has incredible challenges I won't get into right now.

But it took me a long time to figure out. I thought it would be easy. I already know how to do the French accents, since I use them a lot. It's a simple code, a series of keys, and there you have it.

But with that elusive little roof, you first need to alter the keyboard. With the extended US keyboard, you can use a series of keys to create that perky little hat. But I've already forgotten the formula, because now I have a better option: the Slovenian keyboard, which I can flip on whenever I want. So now I can write č and š an ž to my heart's content!

I have arrived!

Holiday Baking: A Bittersweet Taste of My Ethnic Roots

2009-12-11T19:52:00.000-08:00

My parents, children of immigrants, grew up during the Depression. They followed a typical path to success: education and assimilation. But their ambivalence about their ethnic roots weakened when the winter holidays approached.

I’ve always associated the winter holidays with two special holiday sweets: Scottish shortbread, a unique version passed down by my late father; and potica, a rich Slovenian yeast bread my mother learned to make from her mother. Their preparation took on the character of ritual during my childhood. I’ve kept up the tradition.

My father supervised the shortbread making. We started early, just after Thanksgiving, so the shortbread would be properly aged by Christmas. The ingredients were simple: butter, flour, sugar, and a touch of salt.

We would gather around the kitchen table, with a massive pile of butter and sugar in the center, salt-laced flour off to the side. Then five pairs of hands started kneading. My father was very particular about the method: long kneading with warm hands, to allow as much flour as possible to be incorporated into the butter-sugar mix.

Once the shortbread had been worked to the point of being dense, smooth and warm to the touch (a process that could take as much as an hour), my father pressed it thickly into rectangular pans and scored it with a fork. The dough was allowed to rest and then baked to a pale golden brown. Finally, the shortbread was cut into squares and stored in tins between layers of paper towels, to draw off excess moisture.

My father was very clear about the desired outcome: a hard, dry, buttery cube that offered significant resistance to the tooth. Anything less than that, anything thin and crisp and tender, he dismissed as “Lorna Doons.” In other words, commercial shortbread for Americans, about as authentic as chop suey.

My father had learned to make shortbread from his Scottish mother, an angry woman who was often ill. She died before I turned three. Grandma Kilpatrick despised Catholics and had little use for anyone who wasn’t British, according to my mother. Any good baker will tell you that her approach to making shortbread was completely wrong. But in my family, it became the gold standard.

My Slovenian American grandma, who lived into my adolescence, was a sweet, loving woman. She worked magic in the kitchen of that little bungalow on Cleveland’s East Side she shared—unhappily—with my immigrant grandfather. I didn’t learn they were both alcoholics until years after their deaths.

My grandmother’s crowning achievement was potica, a rich pastry masquerading as bread. Potica (pronounced “puh-teetza”) is a national dish in Slovenia—a very small country in Central Europe, about the size of Massachusetts, with a population of around two million. Until the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, it was probably unknown to most Americans. It has a long history of falling under the control of one or the other of its powerful neighbors.

Potica occupies the border region between bread and strudel—just like the Balkans, at the crossroads of east and west. It begins with a rich sour cream yeast dough, rolled out thinly, then spread with a filling of butter, sugar, cinnamon, and walnuts, drizzled with honey. My own mother has always always managed to find one extreme or the other, with the honey: drenching the dough in sweetness, or forgetting it entirely. Next, the potica is rolled up, formed into a loaf or coil, and baked. Potica is usually reserved for special occasions. In my family, it is rationed out like gold—or caviar.

My family’s version of potica has always tasted like baklava. Other fillings do exist: raisins, curd cheese, chocolate, poppy seeds. But I’m partial to the potica I have eaten every Christmas of my life. I now make it myself, but my attempts don’t measure up to my grandmother, my mother—or even my younger son, who first made potica as a project for his ninth grade ethnic studies class.

So this month, just like every December I can recall, I’ll make shortbread and potica. I’ll knead the dough and remember. I’ll taste the sweetness and the sadness. I'll remember the lives of my ancestors. Hard and sweet.

Reading Louis Adamic (An Introduction)

2009-12-03T08:58:00.000-08:00

I've just started reading Louis Adamic's Laughing in the Jungle, published in 1932. It's subtitled The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America.

It was Adamic's second book. His first, Dynamite: A History of Class Violence in America, 1830-1930 came out the previous year. Both books were well-received. But it was Adamic's next book, The Native's Return(1934) that established his reputation as a social critic and chronicler of the immigrant experience. It became a best seller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It sold 70,000 copies in the first two weeks of publication! I read The Native's Return three years ago. Until recently, that was the extent of my exposure to Adamic's writing.

Louis Adamic was prolific: A dozen books, plus a large number of articles and essays in his twenty year writing career. It ended too soon, with his mysterious death in 1951. A suicide or a political murder, depending on who you believe. But more on that later.

Except for Dynamite, which has just been re-issued, Adamic's books are out of print. There are lots of vintage copies floating around on the Internet, usually at modest cost. Except for Laughing in the Jungle, which seems to be pretty scarce. I paid about $45 for my copy.

I've just been reading about Adamic's school days at a gymnasium in Ljubljana, now the capitol of Slovenia. He writes that his mother used to visit him at his student boarding house every couple of months. It wasn't such an easy trek from their peasant village of Blato ("mud.") She would bring him fruit and potica. "Carniolan cake," Adamic called it, using one of the old names for Slovenia.

Potica. That makes me smile. It's the one bit of our Slovenian heritage my family never lost. We make potica every Christmas and ration it out like gold. But I found a little bit in the freezer, left over from last year. So I've been defrosting a slice now and then.

I thought potica out of season might function like Proust's madeleine. At the very least, I figured it might help put me in the mood for my new writing project. Potica is very rich, with all that butter and honey, so it does keep well. But this particular batch was definitely the worse for wear after a year in the freezer.

Time for a new batch. Here's a nice potica link.

Just off the boat. (Found them at last!)

2009-11-29T17:55:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a day. I finally found the immigration records for my grandfather and for my grandmother's parents.

I'd been looking around that Ellis Island website for a few years, on and off. For the last two weeks, I've been searching one of the big subscription genealogy sites (Ancestry.com). But no luck.

Finally, today I read the fine print. I checked out the search instructions I'd ignored. I figured out how to use the "wild card" search feature, where you simply approximate the name you are searching for.

My eyes are crossed and my neck is sore. I've been poring over passenger manifests. I've seen more variations than I care to recall on Adamic-Adamick-Adamich, Strukel-Struckel-Strukelj, and Kozlevcar-Kozlevchar-Kozleviar (not to mention Louis, Alois, Alvis, Aloije, Josephine, Josefa, Pepa.)

And wouldn't you know, my elusive Grandpa Carr (aka Kozlevcar) seems to have come through by way of Philadelphia, rather than New York. No wonder I couldn't find him on that Ellis Island site!

I feel like a very successful P.I.

Plymouth Rock or Ellis Island?

2009-11-27T14:45:00.000-08:00

Like so many Americans, my roots in this country don't go back very far. My family was part of that great wave of immigration that peaked in the early part of the twentieth century.

No Mayflower or D.A.R. for us. It was Ellis Island rather than Plymouth Rock, in the words of the Slovenian American writer/journalist Louis Adamic (1899-1951), who emigrated as a teenager in 1913. Adamic went on to become perhaps the most prominent chronicler of the early 20th century "new immigrant" experience.

They called them "new immigrants" to distinguish them from the "old stock" Americans who had came earlier, from Great Britain and Western Europe. Mostly, these new Americans were Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe. They had funny accents and hard-to-pronounce last names.

Many of the "old stock" Americans worried about the consequences of opening the doors so wide. Eventually, the doors slammed shut, with restrictive legislation in place by the mid-1920s.

So I'm grateful that the doors were open long enough for my family to slip through. My Slovenian grandfather came through Ellis Island around 1913, just like Louis Adamic. My grandmother was born to parents who had emigrated from Slovenia around 1900. (Louis Adamic was her cousin, according to family lore.) When my mother with very young, they spoke only Slovenian at home.

My late father was Scottish, an ethnic background that's always been acceptable to "old stock" Americans. But I think there was something a little dodgy about how he got here. His family seems to have slipped in by way of Canada. My father didn't figure out he needed naturalization papers until he was drafted in World War II.

So now the "new immigrants" and their descendants have become the old guard. Too many of them—of us—are worried about the newest immigrants, legal and not, from all those other places. Mexico and China. India and the Middle East and Africa. How many of us are prepared to shut the door now that we have safely passed through it ourselves?

We need to remember where we came from and be grateful. And, when we can, we need to open doors and not close them.

(Note: this was originally written as a post-Thanksgiving essay on gratitude, in connection with the Red Room writing community. It seemed like a fitting way to initiate this new blog.)